MONTREAL -- The made-in-Canada term “visible minority” has come under fire for various reasons, most recently by a United Nations body that last year found it racially insensitive.

A more persuasive argument for retiring the phrase comes in the latest census data released Wednesday: In a growing number of Canadian communities in Ontario and British Columbia, it is the Caucasians who are a minority.

In Markham, Ont., and Richmond, B.C., 65% of residents are so-called visible minorities. In Brampton, Ont., the figure is 57%; in Burnaby, B.C., 55%; and in Vancouver, 51%. Toronto is not far behind at 47%.

Overall, the Canadian population remains overwhelmingly white. Recent immigration has pushed the number of Canadians classified as visible minorities above five million for the first time, but that is still just 16.2% of the total population.

“This is a huge country, but immigration, especially visible-minority immigration, is extraordinarily concentrated in just a few square miles -- metropolitan Vancouver, metropolitan Toronto and then much smaller pockets in the other cities,” said David Ley, a professor of geography at the University of British Columbia.

Combined, metropolitan Toronto and metropolitan Vancouver are home to 23% of the Canadian population, but 60% of all Canada’s visible minorities live in the two regions, the census shows. The Statistics Canada report on the census figures is deceptively titled “Canada’s Ethnocultural Mosaic,” which suggests a balanced pattern of different colours spreading from coast to coast.

“The 5-million is not scattered everywhere across the country. The fact that it’s heavily concentrated is what could potentially raise some issues,” Mr. Ley said.

In the context of federal legislation to prevent workplace discrimination against minorities, “visible minorities” are defined as “persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour.” Their numbers are growing rapidly -- at more than five times the growth rate of the total population -- largely because of immigration. Three-quarters of new arrivals to Canada between 2001-2006 belonged to a visible minority group.

The influx into urban centres has led some to question whether the arrival of foreign customs will undermine long-standing Canadian values. The insecurity has been most pronounced in Quebec, where a government commission into the “reasonable accommodation” of ethnic and religious minorities is due to report next month.

In fact, the census shows that despite its collective hand-wringing, Quebec has just the fifth-highest proportion of visible minorities among Canadian provinces. At 8.8%, it ranks behind British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta and Manitoba. Even in metropolitan Montreal, where 90% of the province’s visible minorities live, the proportion of non-whites is 16.5%, barely above the national average.

Daniel Stoffman, author of Who Gets In, a book on Canadian immigration policy, said most Torontonians have adapted to their city’s changing complexion, but visitors are taken aback. “It’s a cultural divide,” he said.” I remember when a friend of mine came to the city from northern Ontario, and I directed him to take the subway. He just couldn’t believe how many non-white people there were on the train. He’d never seen anything like that before.”

While he thinks most immigrants eventually adopt Canadian values, he worries that current levels -- Canada admits about 250,000 immigrants a year -- could create ethnic enclaves if well-paying jobs are not available. In his book he wrote about school teachers in Richmond, B.C. confronted with Canadian-born children of immigrants who were starting school unable to speak English.

“If everybody in the area is speaking the same language, then the kids have absolutely no incentive to learn any other language, and they’re not learning it very well in the school either, because all the other kids are speaking the same language.”

Daniel Weinstock, a professor of political philosophy at Université de Montréal, says that so far Canada has done a commendable job integrating immigrants.

“Of course it changes the nature of social relations, it changes the nature of the society, it raises challenges, but by and large, comparing Canada with most other countries that are high-immigration countries, it has been doing so fairly successfully,” he said.

What concerns him is evidence that recent immigrants are facing a harder time getting up to speed economically. “The happy middle-class Jewish enclaves that I knew as a youth, where people would get in their cars in the morning, go downtown to work and come home at the end of the day is one thing,” he said. “Angry unemployed people who are concentrated together and get to spend the day together not working and feeding each other’s, very often justified, resentment, is quite another. . . . I think that we really have to, as a society, take a long hard look at why it is that in the context of one of the healthiest most robust economic periods in this country’s history, what used to be true of immigrants, that they hit the ground running economically, is no longer true.”

Mr. Ley said managing the integration of immigrants is a challenge facing developed countries around the world, and he thinks Canada is headed in the right direction. “We’ve chosen not to go the French way, which is a very strong position that you come here and you be like us. A more multicultural view is that there’s give and take and there’s an evolution of a national society. That is the choice that Canada has made.” And in important pockets of the country, the visible minorities will inevitably become a majority. “I think we’ll be looking for a new term soon,” he said.

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